Meta Specter by Savannah Calhoun

Issue 181

Meta Specter is a series of photographic still lives, digital collages, photo murals, and installations that address the concepts of nostalgia, hauntologies, and lost futures. It is deeply inspired by the writings of Grafton Tanner and Mark Fisher.

This work examines a space of temporariness within art. With this also comes haunting, and the term "hauntology" refers to the “return or persistence of elements from the social or cultural past, as in the manner of a ghost.” This idea is heavily tied to nostalgia, and as an instrument of the past, photography in particular resonates well with it. The idea of being “haunted” by something can be compared to media repeating itself. In a society plagued by late-stage capitalism, we yearn for a utopian society that never came to manifest in the 21st century. Technology has become a source of harvesting data for profit rather than a tool to unite and connect people. Formerly optimistic about the future, it has not shaped itself the way that we used to believe it would, and the things we used to believe would save us are now a source of monotony. Concerning imagemaking, this series uses symbols of photography’s moving parts and pieces within its imagery to discuss photography’s position in our contemporary culture. These objects and symbols include the transparency layer in photoshop, cameras, film canisters, external photographs, etc. Considering hauntology as a theme within the work, Meta Specter serves to speak about photography from within. The death of the future is ever-present within photography as a medium due to the abundance of images and the wake of artificial intelligence.

Meta Specter is on view at Aurora PhotoCenter in Indianapolis through May 15th.

Savannah Calhoun (she/her) lives and works in Muncie, Indiana, USA.
savannah-calhoun.com| @sav.calhoun